Sidney Wade - Blue

BirdNote^®  
Sidney Wade - Blue
Written by Mark Bramhill

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.

April is National Poetry Month in the US, and to celebrate, we're featuring some of our favorite contemporary writers’ work about our feathered friends. Sidney Wade is the author of Bird Book, a poetry collection entirely about birds. She's been an avid birdwatcher for nearly two decades, ever since tagging along with her local Audubon group:

Sidney Wade: I remember very clearly the moment it happened. The group leader managed to find a small bird called a Northern Parula and it's extraordinarily beautiful. They usually hang out in the very tops of trees, and so unless you're looking for them, you just won't see them. And when I finally got this little bird in my binoculars, I started screaming “It's so beautiful. Oh my God, it's so beautiful!”

When you get a spectacular looking creature in your binoculars, it looks like you're standing right next to it. You just lose yourself. It's a very zen kind of an experience. You're no longer there. It's a really beautiful experience.

Mark Bramhill: Since first spotting that Northern Parula, Wade has learned a lot about birds. But for even a lifelong birder, there are days where you learn something new and entirely unexpected. Here's Sidney with a poem about one such encounter with a Double-crested Cormorant:

Sidney Wade:

Blue

The great blue 
song of the earth 
is sung in all 
the best venues—
treetop, marsh, 
desert, shore— 
and on this spring 
day in the wetlands
where, under
a late sun,
we stand alone 
and in love 
with each other
and the passing day
we watch a cormorant
whose eye is ringed 
in blue diamonds,
a shimmering lure,
and we love this blue 
and this dark bird 
and this deepening sky 
that pinks and hums
in the west, and then

the bird opens his beak 
and flutters his throat 
and the late 
afternoon light 
illuminates 
the inside tissue 
of his mouth 
which is as blue 
as his ocular jewelry, 
as blue as the bluest
ocean, as blue 
as the sky in all 
its depth, as blue 
as the back of the small 
and determined beetle
who struggles to roll 
his enormous dung ball 
in his own breeding bid 
to enchant another 
small blue miracle.

Mark Bramhill: Sidney had this discovery at one of her favorite birding spots, Sweetwater Wetlands Preserve near her home in Gainesville, Florida:

Sidney Wade: Tons of cormorants out there. And part of cormorants’ mating plumage is they get this beautiful sapphire ring around their eye — and I had not known that the inside tissue of their mouths their beaks turns blue as well.

And that’s the first time I’d ever seen it. And the sun was just right, you know, its mouth was open and you could look right into this blue gullet, which was just astonishing. It’s just an astonishing color.

Mark Bramhill: Anyone who’s been birding or even just marveled at the little brown birds in the backyard knows how beautiful birds can be — and Sidney Wade’s writing captures that beauty on the page. Find a whole lot more of her poems about birds in her collection Bird Book. There’s a link on our website, BirdNote.org.

For BirdNote, I’m Mark Bramhill.

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Senior. Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: SamJohnson
Managing Producer: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Ariana Remmel
Content Director: Jonese Franklin

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. ML196483 and ML 229129 recorded by B McGuire. XC 109881 A Spencer Xeno-canto Foundation.  
BirdNote’s theme composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2019 BirdNote   April 2019/2026   Narrator: Mark Bramhill
 
ID# wades-01-2019-04-04     wades-01